Widely heralded for her bestselling first novel ( Feed My Dear Dogs ) and award-winning stories ( Sister Crazy , also nominated for the Orange Prize), Emma Richler finally returns with a dazzling major novel with the power of A.S. Byatt's Possession , the wit and wonder of Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda and Kate Atkinson's Life After Life --about a sister and her adopted brother with a one-of-a-kind connection: a profoundly moving, original love story about the unbreakable ties that bind, and the choices we make or create for ourselves. Zachariah and Rachel are brother and sister. Well, not exactly. They are star-crossed lovers. Well, not exactly. Rachel is the cherished daughter of a Russian family living in London--the richly imagined, mysterious Wolffs; Zach is her parents' adopted son who arrived from the orphanage with one sweater, a head of curls and a dexterous set of fists. As children, they became as close as two people can be. But when they crossed a forbidden line, there was no going back. Now, as an adult, coping with their father's furious rebuttal of Zach, Rachel sets herself the task of inventing a family history for her beloved. And so she brings to life his imagined ancestry--from a tavern-educated boxer in Dickensian times, to a Hussar at the Battle of Borodino during the Napoleonic Wars--even as their troubles in present-day Camden Town build to yet another point of no return. Cartwheeling through history, filled with art and science, fairy tales and folk songs, tsars and foundlings, epic battles in the prize ring and on the Eastern Front, and characters that take over our hearts, Be My Wolff is riveting--wondrous, funny and tragic and of astonishing imagination and beauty.

When Ike Goldman, a seventy-eight-year-old retired law professor at Columbia University, dissuades a much younger woman from jumping off the George Washington Bridge, he never suspects that his selfless action will lead to love. Nor does he suspect that the sensitive and caring woman whom he saved from herself will be accused of murdering her abusive ex-husband. Ike cannot believe that Elizabeth could be capable of such an act, but he has known her for only six weeks and cannot stop the questions that hound him. Was the abuse that Elizabeth suffered during her eight-year marriage enough to drive her to murder? Could Ike's love for her blind him to a dark side of her personality? Does her refuge in her Catholic faith mask a dreadful vengeance? In the swirling thrust and parry of Elizabeth's trial, Ike is forced to examine his hopes, his beliefs, and his love for a woman whose life hangs in the balance.